August 25, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Constipation, Hubris, Sincerity By The Paris Review Arista Alanis, “ … on down the road” (detail), oil on canvas, 30″ x 24″. From the cover of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. I first encountered Arthur Schnitzler’s work as an undergraduate, when I read Traumnovelle (which was adapted by Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut). NYRB Classics has just come out with a recently unearthed Schnitzler novella, Late Fame, and I was excited to relive my college days with some fin de siècle Viennese fiction. Picking up this story in the spirit of nostalgia is apropos: the narrative follows an aging man, Saxberger, who is suddenly swept up into a group of young artists. They’ve discovered a book of poetry that Saxberger published thirty years earlier, have decided he is a genius, and want to hold a reading in his honor. What ensues is Saxberger’s comedic reckoning with a life he could have had: attention from a glamorous woman, exuberant toasts, and an ardent career in art (rather than as a civil servant). The cast of characters is vibrant with types—the tragedienne, the brooding critic, the romantic Wordsworthian—all rendered each with their own shade of irony. As he spends more time with this cohort, he comes to realize that he is not the person they want him to be: “His efforts were in vain. Laughable was what they had been. It was over. At heart it was simple and not even very sad—no sadder than age itself, hardly sadder than the thirty years in which no verse had ever occurred to him.” The levity of Schnitzler’s tone mitigates any deeply poignant feeling and saves the story from slipping into the realm of the melancholic, where it would perhaps be less appealing. The story considers questions of artistry and recognition (if a book of poems is published but nobody reads it, does it really exist?), but it is best in the subtle fun it pokes at its characters and their delusions of grandeur. —Lauren Kane The first I ever heard of Ross Gay was from another poet, who, at a reading, mentioned anecdotally that he had come across Gay at a café in Harlem. When asked what he was up to, Gay responded, “Writing down things that delight me.” Two seasons later, with Gay’s most recent book in my hands, I see how wonderful and serious an occupation this is for Gay. This collection is called Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude—and it is. Almost no one has the faith he seems to have in poetry’s ability to tap grace from the happenings of his life. (Don’t mistake his exuberance solely for bliss: my guess is that as a black man in America, Gay cannot afford naivety.) He looks to the act of writing as real alchemy, and death, disappointment, and inequity become honey in his hand. Gay devotes a poem to getting shit on by a bird, finds subterranean rhythm in “the passenger seat of this teal Mitsubishi,” and, in “An Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt,” does magic with the most quotidian tasks: “sometimes / the buttons / will be on the other / side and / I am a woman / that morning.” —Julia Berick Read More
August 18, 2017 This Week’s Reading What (Else) Our Writers Are Reading This Summer By The Paris Review Earlier this summer, in place of our usual staff picks, we asked five contributors from our Summer issue to write about what they’d been reading. This week, we’ve asked five more. You can read June’s writer picks here. Mihail Sebastian, circa 1930–45. I just finished Mihail Sebastian’s 1934 novel/notebook For Two Thousand Years, which Other Press is about to publish for the first time in the U.S. It is—among many other things—an elegant and candid and horrifyingly understated account of watching violent unreason rise around you. He almost can’t believe what’s happening. Alli Warren’s I Love It Though, from the excellent Nightboat Books, is helping me to love it, the whole fucked up thing, despite the long daily litany of reasons to despair: “I wave a flag for brute feeling,” she writes, and I’m rallying to it. “Or the courage or not / of me and my friends / orbital in lilt, directive in drink / while container ships brim / and caps and bergs / slope across the slog / I want to be able to continue / to love to stay alive.” With my daughter’s I’m reading ¿Qué puedes hacer con una paleta? by Carmen Tafolla, illustrated by Magaly Morales. I’m reading it some thirty times a night. —Ben Lerner (“The Camperdown Elm”) I recently read two excellent, very different books about identity, home, and belonging (the theme of my recent Paris Review Daily piece). The first was Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, which uses personal interviews to analyze why people in the Southern U.S. are often hostile to government protections for their own threatened and beloved environment—and more broadly, why these people voted for Trump. The book helped me see how these choices might make at least an emotional kind of sense. The second is also set in the American South, and plays a terrifying thought experiment with Hochschild’s story of the deep antagonism and mutual misunderstanding between the North and the South of the United States. American War by Omar El Akkad evokes a dystopian future in which the disagreement about the proper use of fossil fuels leads to another American civil war, and we see how one individual—a girl from Louisiana who grows up in a refugee camp for displaced persons and is later subjected to years of torture—forms a desperate, enraged, dangerous sense of identity through her attachment to a home that has been utterly destroyed. —Emily Wilson (a translation of Homer’s Odyssey) Read More
August 11, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Spooks, Oddballs, Dopes By The Paris Review Jan Morris. I went to visit Jan Morris in North Wales a few months ago and heard her saying some of the same things you will hear in this recording. Nothing made me miss America—and especially New York—more than hearing this distinctly English woman, ninety years of age, lyrically and lovingly reminisce about her time there. “I’ve loved America since I first knew it twelve presidencies ago,” she says, “and I love and honor all that’s best about it today.” —Mitzi Angel The current issue of Granta contains an essay so good, so expressionistic and yet so cooly observed, that it made me think of Didion or Naipaul at their best. In “Notes on a Suicide,” Rana Dasgupta uses the death of a nineteen-year-old girl, in a town outside Paris, as a prism through which to view contemporary France and what it means to be young today: “Océane was the first person to broadcast a live suicide on today’s social media platforms. During the hours I spent watching her online videos, however, I never got the feeling that she was, in other respects, unusual. I saw traits in her common to a lot of people these days—and possibly to myself, even if they are more pronounced in the young: she was subdued, serious, intermittently funny, distracted by constant electronic tics, slightly unavailable to herself … In so many respects, Océane seemed entirely normal, and I sensed that her online exploit, too, would become more customary over time.” —Lorin Stein Read More
August 4, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Pinkies, Pain, Plays By The Paris Review From And She Would Stand Like This. Photo by Ahron R. Foster. Lately, our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, has been researching the early formation of the blues, in the years 1870 to 1910. His studies led him to an old newspaper from his own town in North Carolina, but nearly every edition of the paper had vanished. Now he and his colleague Joel Finsel have organized a group of middle schoolers to find and transcribe surviving copies. In John’s words: “The Wilmington Daily Record, a seminal African American newspaper (the offices of which were torched during a violent white-supremacist uprising here in 1898), has always been known to history and considered important, either inspiring or infamous depending who was talking. But for all practical archival purposes, it didn’t exist. You couldn’t read it, even if you had access to the fanciest academic databases and things. That was a very specific historical problem that we set out to solve. And we did find some copies. The most exciting moment was when Jan Davidson, the historian at our local historical museum, realized she had three copies of the paper in the basement of the museum!” John’s discoveries haven’t been limited to Wilmington. He recently struck gold in Indiana, too: “I knew that the songwriter Paul Dresser had once been in love with a woman named Sal, an Indiana madam, and that she’d inspired his famous song ‘My Gal Sal,’ which I wanted to know more about for a piece about Dresser that ran in the Sewanee Review. Anyway, as I’m reading around in the Evansville Courier and Press for the 1870s and eighties, I start seeing references to ‘bagnios,’ one of the period euphemisms for brothels, and then to a person called Sallie Davis, who supposedly kept the nicest one in town, and finally to ‘Sal’s place,’ as shorthand for the same establishment. On further inquiry, the woman’s real name turned out to be Annie, just like Paul Dresser’s brother had always said it was, the brother being Theodore Dreiser.” —Lorin Stein Friday night, I was in the presence of realness, fierceness, and royalty. I sat front row for And She Would Stand Like This, a theatrical retelling of Euripides’s The Trojan Women by Harrison David Rivers. Making use of drag and ball culture, the play, directed by David Mendizábal, reimagines the Trojan women as black and Latinx queer men and transgender women. It is set in a hospital waiting room, where an unnamed virus ambiguously fills the role of the warring Greeks, pitiless and destructive. By leaving the virus unnamed, Rivers renders timeless the early days of AIDS, reminding those who need reminding that there are still waiting rooms where doctors face queer and transgender populations with uncertainty, especially when these patients are people of color. The play beautifully complicates the essential trauma of kinship, love, and belonging with several times the body glitter and melanin of Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim. Rivers and the talented cast use chorus, repetition, and performance to their highest level of impact. The play turns masterfully on its platform stilettos, delivering triumphant choreography by the supreme Kia LaBeija and somber tragedy worthy of, well, the ancient Greeks. Performances are through Sunday, but RuPaul has already tweeted an endorsement, so act fast. —Julia Berick Read More
July 28, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cuddy, Boont, Zuzzo By The Paris Review From the cover of Wi the haill voice. Do we need a translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poems into Scots? The late Scottish poet Edwin Morgan would certainly say we do. His belief was that Scots is more suited than English to the “ ‘barbarian lyre’ of the revolutionary spirit” in Mayakovsky’s verse. And I think I agree. Wi the haill voice, a collection of Morgan’s twenty-five translations originally published forty-five years ago, was reissued last year in the UK, and I’ve just discovered it. Scots reads onomatopoeically, reproducing the verve and jump of Mayakovsky’s verse: “Forcryinoutloud! / The starns licht up—aa richt: / does that prove some loon hud to hae it?” I don’t know the language and so used the book’s glossary to perform a second translation (and learned many wonderful words in the process, including grumphie [“pig”] and collieshangie [“squabble”]). But really, it’s more fun to read without meaning, instead feeling the rhythm and energy of the language, which becomes a zaum-ian exercise: “The cuddy cam clunk, / cloitit doon doup-scud, and wheech / but the muckle-mou’d moochers wena lang / in makin theirsels thrang.” —Nicole Rudick Last week, the podcast Some Noise finished up a three-part series on the Anderson Valley, home to Boonville, the birthplace of the Boontling language. The area is a sort of last stop on a trail to nowhere at the end of America—the stretch of California is sometimes called “the lost coast.” It’s a steep, rugged, isolated country whose industries are logging, hops farming, grape orcharding, and, relatively recently, marijuana growing. Host Najib Aminy learns all this while investigating gentrification in rural America, but he also stumbles upon decades-old feuds between San Francisco’s exiled hippies and local rednecks, and lots more. “Times has changed terribly,” says the old-timer Wes Smoot, also known by his Boont name, Deacon, meaning “looker” (perhaps “seer”). Smoot is one of the last fluent speakers of Boontling, whose words, Aminy finds, exist mostly on wine and beer labels glued to the drinks produced in the area. In 2018, pot will finally be legal for recreational use in California. As the date approaches, residents of the Anderson Valley, located squarely in the state’s notorious Emerald Triangle, are both weary and eager about the next boom. Aminy finds it fitting that one of the latest Boontling words, invented by Smoot is “downstreamer.” “Downstreamers are salmon come up to spawn,” says Smoot. “And when they spawn, their life is done, and then they start back downstream. Well, when they go downstream, they’re all wore out, and, finally, they die, you know?” —Jeffery Gleaves Read More
July 21, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Disaster, Calamity, Ecstasy By The Paris Review From the cover of The Violins of Saint-Jacques. I bet you didn’t know that Patrick Leigh Fermor, recognized as Britain’s greatest travel writer during his lifetime, penned a novel, or that it was adapted into a three-act opera in 1966. No new productions are scheduled, but The Violins of Saint-Jacques was reissued last week, so I’ve spent my mornings with a nameless narrator listening to Berthe de Rennes, an elderly Frenchwoman, recall a Mardi Gras ball on the titular Caribbean island in February 1902. The Violins is a kind of travel book, too: chock-full of elaborate details about French architecture, local politics, geography, and the weather. The moldering French aristocracy’s tense relations with local “creoles” are never far from view, nor is the Romeo-and-Juliet-style plot between the mayor’s and governor’s families. The island’s volcano lingers above the lot. Though Saint-Jacques is a figment, the novel’s later, defining event (spoiler alert) is based on something that occurred in Saint Pierre on Martinique, on the same date. In his travel writing, Fermor had an uncanny ability to take readers somewhere impossible; so, too, with this novel. Saint-Jacques never existed and the world it’s based on is long gone, yet The Violins of Saint-Jacques is a full-color Caribbean cruise–cum–French tragedy, one well worth the trip. —Jeffery Gleaves The other day, I plucked an advance copy of Meghan O’Rourke’s new collection of poems, Sun in Days, from a colleague’s bookshelf and curled up with it in one of the office reading chairs. Though I had barely begun before having to return to my work, I found myself mesmerized and finished the book later that evening. It’s a slim compendium, just over a hundred and twenty pages, with an arresting cover: a tangerine-colored globule plunging into an aqua-blue backdrop, like blood in seawater. The poems that follow are arresting, too. O’Rourke’s sparse, unguarded verse traverses the mind of a woman preoccupied with loss and longing, recounting the days that were and the ones that will never be. She remembers a childhood in Maine, the smell of fish guts on her father’s overalls; the addict that paces outside her Paris sublet; she writes over and over of the daughter she wants but cannot have and of her mother who’s died. The lines I love most, though, are the ones that heave with a sort of quiet lonesomeness, like these from “The Night Where You No Longer Live”: “Did you love me or did I misunderstand // Do you intend to come back // Will you stay the night.” —Caitlin Youngquist Read More